Biography

Craig H. Hart received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1987. He was formerly an Associate Professor in the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University. He served as Chair of Marriage, Family, and Human Development in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University from 1998 to 2004, as an associate dean in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences from 2006-2009, and as the Associate Academic Vice President for Faculty at BYU from 2009 to 2018. He has been serving as the Director of the BYU Faculty Center since August of 2018.

Dr. Hart has authored and co-authored numerous scientific papers on parenting/familial linkages with children’s social development and on developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood education. His work has appeared in leading developmental science journals such as Child Development and Developmental Psychology, and in early childhood education research journals including Early Childhood Research Quarterly. His collaborative research program has most recently focused on cultural influences, with studies conducted in Australia, China, Italy, Japan, Russia and various parts of Asia and the United States. Research that he has been involved in has been cited over 10,000 times by national and international scholars in his field.

He has also published two edited books entitled Children on Playgrounds: Research Perspectives and Applications and Integrated Curriculum and Developmentally Appropriate Practice: Birth to Age Eight. He has served on several journal editorial boards, was associate editor for Early Childhood Research Quarterly (1995-2006), and is co-editor of Wiley/Blackwell's Handbook of Childhood Social Development. Dr. Hart has served on the Bio-behavioral and Behavioral Sciences subcommittee, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Research

Dr. Hart's scholarship focuses on linkages among family processes, parenting practices, and children's social development in cultural context. His research also encompasses developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood education.

Current Projects

The PACIFIC Project (Parents and Children in Families and in Cultures) is a multi-cultural study focusing on how family interactions and parenting behaviors affect preschool children’s social and emotional development in a number of Eastern cultures—China, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Turkey. The lead investigators, consisting of BYU faculty in the School of Family Life and collaborators in Asian cultures and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, are studying both universal (similar across cultures) and culturally indigenous (or culture-specific) patterns of parenting and family life in these cultures.

These cultures offer opportunities to gather data in countries with varying political structures and different religious cultural contexts (e.g., secular China; Japanese Buddhists; Muslim Malay majority, and Chinese Buddhist minority). The investigators are comparing families in these cultures with a sample of American families, particularly Asian-American immigrants residing in Maryland, in order to further contribute to our understanding of similarities and differences in Western and Eastern cultural child socialization practices.

The primary focus of the project revolves around observed parenting and family influences associated with preschool children’s development as these factors tend to have lasting influence across the lifespan. Parenting beliefs, practices, and marital factors, as well as the personality of children and parents, are being considered in the prediction of many positive and negative social behaviors and emotional adjustment. Types of aggression, shyness, and prosocial behavior in preschool children are particular behaviors of interest. Over 2,300 families (300 – 350 families in each cultural context) have been recruited for participation in this study.